How to disable physical keyboard in code(use virtual keyboard all the time)

Question

You might ask why do I want that. Here is the reason:

I used a barcode scanner for the login screen of my application. However connecting the barcode scanner will fo

Answer 1

This appears to have some revelance to your case. From the Configuration class documentation.

public int hardKeyboardHidden --- Added in API level 3

A flag indicating whether the hard keyboard has been hidden. This will be set on a device with a mechanism to hide the keyboard from the user, when that mechanism is closed. One of: HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_NO, HARDKEYBOARDHIDDEN_YES.

You can take some action on this config change. But I think there is no way to disable the physical keyboard in android.

Update

There the mHardKeyboardSwitch is a private member that holds a reference to the SwitchView which is used to reflect user's hardware keyboard preference. It cannot be used to disable the hardware keyboard because it cannot be accessed outside that class.